Too Early For Businesses To Join Google+

[image error]Google+ has launched to much excitement, and few are as pumped about it as businesses and nonprofits.  Finally, they can be a part of the social media wave rather than catching up to their customers.  But is it too early?

I say yes, and trust me it is not easy to say that.  As the Director of Marketing and a social media nerd, I am having to sit on my hands to stop myself from creating a Google+ account for GiveForward.  But as someone who has dealt with the ups and downs of running a business's social media, I can tell you now, patience is a virtue.

Lets start with looking at why Google doesn't want businesses on the site just yet. Google has come out and said they aren't ready for organizational profiles and are even saying their policy team will "actively work with profile owners to shut down non-user profiles".

To entice organizations to hold off Google is promising an experience that is unique to businesses and includes deep analytics and connection to products like AdWords.  In fact, they have even provided a spreadsheet where "non-user entities" can apply to be a part of an experiment to test out Google+ with businesses.

But my hesitations are about more than just the limitations of the experience that Google+ currently provides.  My concern is what happens when a group starts with a user profile and later tries to shift to an organizational profile.

This exact problem is something that a number of organizations ran into during the growth of Facebook, and many are still figuring it out today.   Businesses are trying to figure out how to shift their "friends" into "likes" and are losing users in the process.  Another issue is if a company needs to change the name on their Facebook page.  You can't do it, instead you have[image error] to create a new page with the name you want and again, migrate all of your users to the new page, running the risk of losing people.

While I am pumped about Google+ and am having fun with my own user profile, I've seen enough businesses struggle with getting their social media profiles sorted out that I believe jumping into Google+ will just cause undue stress and frustration when the business pages emerge and everyone has to shift to take advantage of the new functionality.

The pros of joining don't outweigh the cons just yet, so for now, my recommendation is wait for the Google+ business profiles.  In the meantime why not join Google+ with a personal profile and learn it as a user so you can have a great plan in place to reach users when you can kick off you organization's page?

Recommended book: What Would Google Do?

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